In her memoir of her childhood, Prague Winter, Madeleine Albright describes what it was like to witness the death of democracy in her native Czechoslovakia. She details how the enemies of democracy were able to elect a plurality of their followers to the parliament and, in coordination with the media that they controlled and the mobs in the streets that they themselves had orchestrated, they confused and divided the majority, which valued liberty. The nation was thus brought into a four-decade era of darkness. Years later, Czechoslovakia’s newly-installed tyrannical rulers in the Czech Communist Party would detail these tactics in an internal report called, “How Parliament Can Play a Revolutionary Part in Transition to Socialism,” which made its way to the West and was published by the United States House of Representatives in the 1960s as a warning to Americans of what can happen when the people are cowed by fear and lured by the siren song of utopia into voluntarily relinquishing their freedom.

The American left has learned the strategies of tyranny all too well. In the run-up to the 2012 election, the misnamed Democratic Party had their union cronies organize the malcontents of society into “Occupy Wall Street” and set them loose on the public. With the media covering up their filth, violence and rapes, “Occupy” distracted Americans from the looming threat of Obamacare and focused attention on “income inequality.” At the same time, the Obama administration turned the IRS into a weapon of political repression and used it against law-abiding citizens to suppress their peaceful voices of dissent.

This is where America stands today: a tyrannical president who is coldly robbing millions of Americans of their healthcare; a renegade judiciary that cannot be relied upon to faithfully follow the word of the Constitution; a power hungry, goose-stepping party that works relentlessly to drag the nation down the road to serfdom; and a castrated opposition party too afraid to fight for their principals. Faced with this bleak outlook, conservative freedom fighter and constitutional lawyer Mark Levin dedicated himself to answering the question callers to his popular radio show ask the most: “What can we do?”

Levin found his answers in Article V of the Constitution. He explains that “[Article V] provides for two methods of amending the Constitution.” In the first method, “two-thirds of Congress passes a proposed amendment and then forwards it to the state legislatures for possible ratification by three-fourths of the states[.]” The second method “involv[es] the direct application of two-thirds of the state legislatures for a Convention for proposing Amendments, which would thereafter also require a three-fourths ratification vote by the states.” It is the second method he focuses on.

This process, it is important to point out, does not provide for a constitutional convention. Instead, it provides a way to offer Amendments to the Constitution over the heads of our inept political ruling class and at the same time preserves enough roadblocks to prevent a runaway caucus. Levin supplements all eleven of his proposed Amendments with the words of the Framers, showing that each of the ideas is in the tradition of their thinking, and offers examples of how these values are at risk by an ever-expanding and oppressive federal leviathan.

New Yorkers can appreciate and identify with many of the proposals:

An Amendment to Establish Term Limits for Members of Congress: New York City had the foresight to put similar term limits on our City Council. After twelve long years we will finally be rid of Democrat Charles Barron, the loudmouthed former Black Panther who used his seat on the City Council to express his racism (“I want to go up to the closest white person and say, ‘You can’t understand this. It’s a black thing’ and then slap him, just for my mental health.”), shill for the world’s worst dictators (as long as they hate America), stunt the economy of his district (when it benefits the unions), and trash “terrorist” Israel and the “Jewish lobby” (comments which, irony of all ironies, earned him the endorsement of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke). This also means that entrenched extremists like Democrat Melissa Mark-Viverito – whose support for Puerto Rican separatism is so extreme that she advocates clemency for FALN terrorists, a group infamous for their deadly bombing campaigns against New York – will not be around forever. This block against entrenchment is good for the City, and it would be good for the Country too.

An Amendment to Limit the Federal Bureaucracy: In the 1960s radical academic Frances Fox Piven devised a scheme whereby the left would flood welfare rolls until “the system” (capitalism) collapses and thereafter build socialism in its wake. The idea took hold in New York and by 1975 the exploding welfare rolls bankrupted the city. In 2010, Piven told the Stalinist Brecht Forum that, “under the radar,” Obama has made appointments to the Federal Bureaucracy that meet her approval. The Bureaucracy wields enormous, and expanding, power over our lives, and the idea that it could be run by a bunch of Frances Fox Pivens should be a perfect enough example to explain why steps should be taken to reign it in:

An Amendment to Protect Private Property: Anyone who lived through Occupy Wall Street can testify to the importance of private property, which the Founding Fathers wisely held to be sacred. Once the malcontents convinced themselves that they had a “right” to “occupy” – or, as the Marxists would say, “expropriate” – the property of others, all semblance of civil society degenerated to the point where, as the New York Post reported at the time, we had “the nauseating spectacle of rapes being reported not to the police, but to the ‘Security Working Group,’ which hands down internal punishments to offenders. According to activist Channing Kehoe, those guilty of assault are punished by having their blankets taken away.” Private property is a central pillar in any decent civilization, and Levin is right to advocate its strengthening.

Levin is fond of saying that Washington will not fix itself. It’s true. He has now shown us a way that we the people can save ourselves. We can take matters into our own hands with The Liberty Amendments, or lazily watch as our freedom is snuffed out by the specter of all-consuming centralized government.